The inaugural project in the newly established Tropfest Feature Program, September is a tender story of friendship and loyalty between two boys on the cusp of adulthood, 15-year-olds Paddy and Ed.
Western Australia, 1968. Ed (Xavier Samuel), the son of a white landowner, and Paddy (Clarence John Ryan), the Aboriginal boy whose family works on their farm, have been best friends since both being born on the same day. Their fathers Rick and Michael managed to cross social, racial and class boundaries, and were also firm friends throughout their lives. Paddy and Ed dream of becoming professional boxers - and together they build an amateur boxing ring where they spar every day, within the wheat fields of Ed's family farm. However the winds of social change are blowing - both for Paddy and Ed, who are on the cusp of becoming men, and in society - where Indigenous rights are beginning to be asserted - with both positive and negative effects for the local communities. Paddy and Ed struggle to keep their easy friendship from disintegrating, especially upon the arrival of the new girl in town, Amelia (Mia Wasikowska)...
Special Agent Matti
Well, farming in the wheat belt of Western Australia is about as exciting as watching grass grow.
September is a quiet little film about quintessential Little Aussie Battlers™ doing it tough on Flounder Farm (they're too rural to be on Struggle Street). What's worse is that it's 1968 and Australia has only just voted aborigines to be human and deserving of things like citizenship, passports, votes and not being slaves at all. This is the shit that hits the fan because being a farmer in the middle of a desert is not as much fun as it sounds.
The boxing is a way to express the emotions that (i) Australian (ii) farming (iii) blokes have difficulty expressing - sport and violence being acceptable ways to do so.
Clarence John Ryan and Xavier Samuel have a great on-screen relationship: there's an easy silence and sly humour that fills the air between them. They represent the future. Their characters' fathers were once the same way but that familiarity has become contemptuous as the master/slave duality plays out. That poison (slavery is bad!) has affected not just these two families but the whole nation (see also Rabbit-proof fence). September is the kind of film that should be on all Australian school syllabi. History, racism, peer pressure, teen life, agriculture, aboriginal culture, mateship. It's all good.
Xavier Samuel is in great danger of growing up to be a real spunk, and that doesn't hurt at all, either.
The Australia, drama movie September is directed by Peter Carstairs and stars Clarence John Ryan, Xavier Samuel, Kieran Darcy-Smith.
M (Infrequent moderate coarse language)
81 minutes (1:21 hours)
Film: 29 November 2007
